The question for today's post is "What do you love about the genre you write in most often?"

If only. I do not have a genre I write in most often. I've got a YA/literary novel out looking for a home - it doesn't even know what genre it is. I've got three mysteries at various stages of done or abandoned. I have a couple more...uh...literary or commercial novels hanging about, and I just entered a chap book competition. My work in progress is a memoir but it might turn into several memoirs. Oh, and I've written five plays that have made it onto the stage.

The one I'm writing is the one I love most. Right now that is memoir, but also poetry as I'm doing that too. I could tell you that no, it is definitely memoir. The rest was just a run up, and like my late blooming love (the fella and I were both fifty when we met), this is true love! Unlike my love life, however, I am pretty sure that I'm just in first throes.

I can tell you what I'd prefer to be published as. A novelist. Not a mystery writer or a YA or a memoirist, a playwright or a poet - nope, a novelist. Like Dickens (who wrote plays) or Ondaatje (poetry and plays) or Atwood (poetry, children's books). Or like Drabble, who wrote novels.

So...My answer to the question is - What I love most about the genre I write in is its lovely mutability, its inability to hold a form, its floaty, slippery, unpinable-downity. I think I might need to name the genre that I write most often in. I shall call it Big Sky & Endless Ocean. Cannot wait to see that on the bookshelf of my favorite independent bookstore!

How about you all? Do you have a laser-like focus on a genre that works for you?

6 comments:

Maybe, that not to bad. I would say write your books and your short stories and let the genre somehow evolved. The main thing is that you get joy and fulfilment out of what you're writing. Wishing you all the best. Shalom aleichem,Pat G @ EverythingMustChange

That's an interesting question about genre, Jan. I focus on crime fiction, and there are so many reasons I do. The right crime fiction really tells us about us ('course, all literature does that, doesn't it?). And if you add in the suspense and the vast variety there is in the genre, well, it's never boring. There's always something else, if I can put it that way.

I'm coming to the conclusion that you can take any genre and use it as an umbrella genre for several others. I've heard it's more a tool for publishers and booksellers to know what shelf to stick it on.

From who you seem to be on the blog, you seem like you're very well-read in the literary genre, thus I could see you as a literary writer. But who am I to say? I have a M.A. in English lit and have read a ton and what do I write? Teen romance. Because I can't see myself doing literary, ultimately. I just don't have the voice for it. Could probably do historical, maybe women's, but my mind doesn't bend toward metaphorical language, which is so highly expected in literary writing.